We Need a Better NAFTA

The new NAFTA is another corporate handout. It won't stem the outsourcing of good jobs or protect the rights of working people. Tell Congress the new NAFTA isn't good enough and to refuse to vote on it.

Happy nurses week! It’s the time of year when our employers honor us for the hard work we do every day, healing and saving lives. While we hear the words of gratitude that come our way this time of year, we also know what would REALLY make nurses feel appreciated by our employers: workplace protections, dignity, and respect.

To that end, NNU’s mighty nurses marked the week by standing up, loud and proud, for a healthier workplace and a healthier world. Check out how we celebrated, nurse-power style:

Tefere Gebre came to the United States in 1984 as a teenager. He and four friends had left their home in war-torn Ethiopia and walked nearly 500 miles across the desert to a refugee camp in Sudan. He was eventually granted asylum as a political refugee and came to the United States by himself, without parents. He settled in Los Angeles, where he learned English and became an advocate for workers’ rights.

When it comes to appreciating educators, please heed an old expression: Walk the walk, don’t just talk the talk. As the head of the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers, I know first-hand that educators go into our profession because they want to make a difference in students’ lives. They need real investments in teaching and learning, like books, supplies, and smaller class sizes; a voice in what happens in their schools; and latitude in their classrooms so they can tailor their teaching to meet the needs of their students.

Longtime labor activist and leader Maria Elena Durazo is a familiar and beloved name to hundreds of thousands of union members and working people. She is vice president for UNITE HERE International Union, which represents more than 270,000 hospitality workers in the U.S. and Canada. And for almost a decade, 2006-2015, she was the first woman elected secretary-treasurer of the powerful Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, representing the interests of more than 300 local unions.

Saying workers are buffeted by automation, globalization and robotics, which threaten high joblessness, and firms robbing them of bargaining power to fight back and get jobs in the looming new economy, the AFL-CIO launched a year-long study of the state of work and the state of U.S. unions.

Replying to a mandate from last year’s AFL-CIO convention, the new Commission on the Future of Work and Unions met at federation headquarters on May 3, first in a 3-hour morning public session, and then behind closed doors for the rest of the day.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership died because it ultimately failed America’s working families. Instead of addressing the economic devastation wreaked by wrong-headed trade deals, the TPP doubled down on a failed, corporate-driven ideology.

As walkouts by teachers protesting low pay and education funding shortfalls spread across the country, the small but growing movement to recruit teachers from overseas is another sign of the difficulty some districts are having providing the basics to public school students.